Blank Canvas (sophocles) - Page Text Content

3: 496 - 406BC He was the son of Sophilus, a well to do industrialist. Sophocles was born in Colonus near Athens and grew up in the most brilliant intellectual period of Athens .

5: He was a great Greek playwritghter. He was chosen to lead the male chorus at the celebration of the Greek victory at Salamis. Sophicles defeated Aeschyinus in one of the drama contests that were then fashionable. Sophocles wrote 125 tragedies but 7 survived. Sophocles ranks foremost among Greek classical dramatists and has been called the poet of Greek humanism par excellence.

7: In Ajax, the hero, whom the lliad describes as second only to Achilles, is humiliated by Agamemnan and Menelaus when the award the arms of Achilles to Odyesseus through intrigue. Antigone is a play about a younger princes who pits herself against her uncle, King Creon, Trachiniae, hercules's wife, Deianira, worries about 15mnths absence of her husband, who has acquired a new love, princess lole, and is bringing her home. Oedipus Rex is a superb example of dramatic irony, its about the inadequacy of human knowledge. Electra Philoctetes, Odysseus is sent with young Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles Oedipus at Colonus, produced postumously,is the most loosely structed most lyrical and longest of his dramas. The two plays that are related are Ajax and Antigone. In these two plays, the reason why their relative is because the focus around modern taste .

9: Sophoclean drama are based on the extant plays. However, Plutarch tells us that there were three periods in Sophocles's literary development: imitation of the grand style of Aeschylus, use of artificial and incisive style, and use of the best style and that which is most expressive of character. Sophocles found tragedy up in the clouds and brought it down to earth. Sophocles dealt with men and showed how a character reacts under stress. The tragedy of Sophocles has been described as a tragedy of character

11: It was Sophocles who raised the number of the chorus from 12 to 15 members and initiated other technical improvements, such as scene painting and better tragic masks.

13: One of the most important of these forms was Tragedy, and the preeminence of Aeschylus , Sophocles, and Euripides in this innovative field was instantly recognized by their contemporaries. If Aeschylus was primarily interested in questions of inherited guilt within the family, and Euripides , Sophocles' contemporary, in exploring the myths of Greece with a critical eye on such matters as the position of women in society or the validity of conventional views of the gods, for Sophocles the center of interest was always the individual human being -- in particular the kind of human being who will not compromise even when he or she clearly perceives the advantages that compromise would bring.

15: The date of his death is more secure: 406 B.C. or 405 B.C. His lifetime thus spanned the fifth century B.C., that period of history which, more than any other, deserves the adjective classic; and Sophocles is often thought of among poets as the embodiment of that classicism.